A place for librarians to get and share information, ideas and inspiration about serving youth of all ages--and their caregivers. Especially for librarians in west-central Wisconsin's Indianhead Federated Library System.

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Welcome to this latest attempt to connect librarians from west-central Wisconsin with each other! Please send in content (booklists, ideas, photos, etc.), and comment on posts so we can help each other.If you were using feedmyinbox to get new posts sent to you before, you'll need to switch to another service (blogtrottr works like feedmyinbox, googlereader is a good blog-reader to try).

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Thursday, January 28, 2016

Thanks to Jodi Bird, Youth Services Manager at the Menomonie Public Library, for this marvelous guest post! I want to try these things myself!

In January
the Menomonie Public Library hosted a Sensory Celebration for our Saturday
Stories series. Families were treated to
activities that tickled all the senses. Each
activity was chosen to let kids explore with their parent or caregiver at their
leisure. We had everything from smelling
jars to a large crawling box with scarves and bells to push through.

Families
also enjoyed using magnets in our sand table,

playing with
homemade play dough,

“writing” in the salt boxes

and discovering the marvel of the sticky side
of contact paper using pom poms and tissue paper.

Yet the
biggest hit of the whole morning were the water beads. Children and adults alike couldn’t get enough
of them. Who knew that a couple tablespoons
of little tiny beads could fill the bottom of our water table with so much
fun? If you would like any specifics
about our sensory party contact Debbie Nelson at children@menomonielibrary.org.

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

I attended quite a few of the Wild Wisconsin Winter Webinars last week, and I'm looking forward to listening to several more of them--I'm going to put it on my calendar so I actually do it, and I encourage you to do the same. All the recordings are here. There is a youth services track, but many of the webinars are useful for everyone! And some of the leadership track sessions were led by youth services phenoms.

Today, I'm just going to mention that if you didn't yet listen to the Road Maps and Sign Posts webinar with Melissa Depper, I hope you will take an hour to do so. Melissa talks about thoughtfully planning ahead for behavior expectations, transitions, and more. Yet another reminder of how important it is to be intentional instead of haphazard with our efforts. This can be difficult when trying to juggle too many things--believe me, that seems to be the story of my life! But having regular reminders of concrete ways to practice this is one of the best ways to help me change my way of doing things.